Around midnight on April 12, 1974, Tong Le Chan reported it was on the verge of being overrun. Afterward, Ngon ordered the destruction of all important papers and documents. All radio communication with III Corps was also shut down. Ngon requested the VNAF aircraft that circled high above the camp to stop dropping illuminating flares so his battalion could leave the base under cover of darkness. Under the skillful leadership of the young ranger commander, the brave men of the 92nd Ranger moved out in combat formation, bringing with them all their wounded.
During the night, the 92nd Rangers engaged the enemy at a few locations on its itinerary and suffered twenty-four killed and thirty-four wounded. The main body of the battalion reached An Loc on April 14. The siege of Tong Le Chan ended officially the next day when the last rangers made it back to An Loc. Four rangers who formed the rearguard were killed while trying to stop the enemy’s pursuit.10
On April 13, VNAF warplanes strafed elements of the NVA 9th Division, which were occupying the abandoned ranger camp, and destroyed most of the remaining structures.
The battle of Tong Le Chan showed that the ARVN was not an army of cowards or incompetents. When well led, ARVN units fought with great courage, not only in big battles such as the recapture of Quang Tri and the siege of An Loc, but also in multiple little battles whose names didn’t appear on U.S. literature on the Viet Nam War. The epic siege of Tong Le Chan was one of these battles. A South Vietnamese reporter probably summed it best when he wrote: “This was the longest siege in contemporary military history, a battle in which there was the biggest imbalance between the opposing forces and finally a withdrawal operation commanded by a young and most courageous battalion commander.”11
The 1975 Invasion
In the middle of NVA’s frantic build-up in preparation for a new invasion, the U.S. Congress, on April 4, 1974, cut military aid to South Viet Nam for the fiscal year 1974–75 from one billion to $750 million. Out of this $750 million, $300 million was appropriated as salary for the personnel employed by the Defense Attaché Office (DAO) in Saigon. Interestingly, Israel received $2.1 billion in military aid during the three-week Yom Kippur War in 1973. In other words, South Viet Nam, over one year, received 21% of what Israel obtained for three weeks. President Thieu, on a TV broadcast, complained that South Viet Nam had to fight a “poor man’s war.”
Toward the end of 1974, the NVA was ready to strike. On January 1, 1975, the NVA’s 7th Division, supported by T-54 tank units, overran the provincial capital of Phuoc Long province in MRIII, 115 kilometers north of Saigon. Although the fall of Phuoc Long would put the enemy at striking distance from the capital of South Viet Nam, President Thieu and the Joint General Staff decided it was too risky to inject an adequate force to save the garrison. American inaction in face of this blatant violation of the Paris Agreement, on the other hand, sent a clear signal to Hanoi that they had carte blanche to launch their spring offensive.
NVA’s next objective was in the Central Highlands. The Communists knew that they would pay a heavy price by attacking Pleiku, the seat of II Corps Headquarters. Instead, applying their traditional “strategy of indirect approach,” they moved their troops as if they were about to attack the above city. Then on March 10, 1975, one division reinforced by one reserve infantry regiment and one armored regiment launched a coordinated attack on the main objective: Ban Me Thuot. The city fell on March 16, despite a heroic defense by elements of ARVN’s 53rd Regiment at Hoa Binh base near Phuong Duc airport. The fall of Ban Me Thuot prompted President Thieu to order the evacuation of Pleiku, which, in turn, triggered the collapse of the entire MRII.
Because this strategy of indirect approach was so crucial in the Viet Nam War—it is safe to say that the collapse of South Viet Nam in 1975 was nothing more than a series of successful envelopments—it begs further discussion at this point. First, in 1972, the NVA launched their Easter Offensive with a frontal attack on Quang Tri and two deep envelopments in Kontum and An Loc; as we have seen earlier, this offensive had failed because the NVA lacked the strategic mobility to reinforce three separate fronts. The reverse was true in 1975, when this strategy of indirect approach was made easier for the Communists, not only because of a new system of roads built after the Paris Agreement, but also because the ARVN, by that time, had lost its strategic mobility to reinforce the areas under attack.
In MRI, instead of launching a frontal assault on Hue and Danang, the NVA massed superior forces to attack the Truoi area south of Hue and the Quang Tin area south of Danang. The collapse of MRII, on the other hand, made the defense of MRI more precarious. Judging the situation untenable, Gen. Ngo Quang Truong, I Corps commander, ordered the evacuation of Hue on March 23 and the evacuation of Danang, the second biggest city of South Viet Nam, on March 27.
It was unfortunate, in retrospect, that during the Viet Nam War the United States preferred to adopt a strategy of static defense by building a chain of fire support bases along the Laotian border—including Khe Sanh—instead of seizing the initiative by applying the strategy of indirect approach that General MacArthur had so brilliantly implemented in the daring landing in Inchon, Korea, in September 1950. This envelopment by sea had allowed the United Nations’ troops to recapture Seoul and to inflict irreparable losses to the North Korean Army. Recently, an American author commented that political realities in the U.S. and the world would never have permitted an invasion north of the DMZ. But one wonders why these “political realities” had permitted the heavy bombing raids around Hanoi and the mining of Hai Phong harbor.
Bui Tin, a former NVA colonel and editor of Nhan Dan, the Communist Party’s official newspaper,12 recently disclosed that Gen. Le Trong Tan, Chief of Staff, Viet Nam People’s Army, told him in 1977: “The Americans needed to deploy no more than a division to occupy the Dong Hoi panhandle temporarily, China would have sat idly by while our troops were pinned down, defending our rear in the North—our unavoidable priority. The configuration of the war would have been flipped completely.”13
Bui Tin reported, on the other hand, that Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap was very concerned about North Viet Nam’s vulnerability should the United States and ARVN forces occupy the panhandle area south the Gianh River and that every year he conducted military exercises to counter that possibility.
In other words, had the United States executed envelopments by sea north of the DMZ in the late 1960s, NVA’s supply lines to the South would have been cut off, the sieges of Khe Sanh and An Loc—with the attendant staggering losses in human lives—could have been avoided, the enemy rear would have been threatened, the North Vietnamese people might have risen up against the Communist dictatorial regime, the war could have been won, or at least some kind of armistice similar to the one in Korea could have been reached, and peace may have been a possibility.
The Battle of Xuan Loc (April 8–April 20, 1975)
To exploit their successes in the northern MRs, the North Vietnamese hurled their entire IV Corps—consisting of three divisions and supporting tank and artillery regiments—against the 18th Division defending Xuan Loc. After the collapse of MRI and the northern part of MRII, Xuan Loc, Bien Hoa, and Cu Chi, in fact, became the last defense line against the NVA’s advance toward the capital. The city of Xuan Loc, in particular, took on a special strategic importance. Situated about eighty kilometers northeast of Saigon, Xuan Loc controlled the vital junction of RN1 and RN20, the two paved highways into Saigon from the coastal cities and from the Central Highlands. The fate of the capital—and of the Republic—thus hinged on this last vestige of South Vietnamese resistance.
To prepare for the NVA’s attack on Xuan Loc, Brig. Gen. Le Minh Dao, 18th Division commander, deployed his units as follows:
-Task Force 43 (Col. Le Xuan Hieu), consisting of 43rd Regiment (-2/43 Battalion), 5th Armored Squadron, 2/52 Battalion, 82nd Ranger Battalion, and Long Khanh Territorial Forces, was responsible for the defense of Xuan Loc.
-Task Force 48 (Lt. Col. Tran Minh Cong), consisting of 48th Regiment
and supporting units, was assigned the task of securing RN1 east of Xuan Loc.
-Task Force 52 (Col. Ngo Ky Dung), consisting of 52nd Regiment (-2/52 Battalion) and supporting units, was responsible for the defense of the western sector along RN 20.
In mid-March 1975, elements of NVA’s IV Corps overran Dinh Quan District on RN20 and Binh Khanh District on RN1, effectively isolating Xuan Loc from the Central Highlands and the coastal areas. In early April, the enemy seized important areas within Long Khanh province.
The first attack on Xuan Loc began at 5:40 A.M. on April 8. After intense artillery preparation, all three divisions of NVA’s IV Corps assaulted South Vietnamese positions from three directions:
- The 6th Division attacked Tran Hung Dao hamlet from the north in an effort to secure RN1 in the vicinity of the latter’s junction with RN20, and to interdict ARVN rescuing columns from the south.
- The 7th Division attacked Xuan Loc from the northeast; its mission was to seize the town of Tan Phong located at the junction of RN1 and IPR2, just south of the city.
- The newly formed 341st Division attacked the western sector of Xuan Loc in order to secure RN20 from the town of Kien Tan to the junction of RN1 and RN20.
Map 14: Battle of Xuan Loc
The NVA 274th Regiment/ 6th Division succeeded in capturing the high ground north of RN1 but was stopped by the 1st Battalion, 52nd Regiment. The other prong of the 6th Division, led by the 33rd Regiment, met furious resistance from the territorial forces of Long Khanh province and had to withdraw.
On the northeastern sector, ARVN’s 43rd Regiment threw back repeated assaults from the 165th Regiment/7th Division. Four T-54s and one PT-76 tank were destroyed inside the barbed wire.14 On the right flank of the 43rd Regiment, the 82nd Ranger Battalion, defending Xuan Loc airstrip, inflicted heavy casualties to the NVA’s 209th Regiment, which attacked across open terrain.
On the west, the NVA’s 270th Regiment/341st Division launched an attack on Nui Thi Hill west of An Loc, but was stopped by 2/43 Battalion. Regiment 266/341st Division, attacking in the direction of Long Khanh High School, was beaten back by the 18th Reconnaissance Company and two RF battalions. However, one battalion of the 266th Regiment succeeded in infiltrating through the defenders’ lines and establishing an enclave in the market and church area.
At around 11:00 A.M., General Dao used his reserve—consisting of two infantry battalions and two RF battalions, supported by elements of the 5th Armored Squadron—to launch a counter-attack to regain the areas occupied by elements of NVA’s 341st Division in the morning. The North Vietnamese offered furious resistance but the penetrating units were destroyed in the afternoon and left many dead.
During the two-day attack on An Loc, ARVN artillery provided effective fire support because Colonel Hung, the division artillery commander, had dispersed his units to avoid enemy counter-battery fire and prepared planned missions on expected enemy avenues of approach. VNAF’s F-5 Freedom Fighters (single-seat fighter-attack aircraft) and Skyraiders from Bien Hoa-based squadrons, on the other hand, were very effective against enemy units attacking in the open and identified enemy formations around Xuan Loc. C-130s dropping illuminating flares also helped the defenders detect enemy movements at night and destroy them with artillery.
On April 12, ARVN/JGS reinforced the 18th Division with the 1st Airborne Brigade. General Dao ordered the paratroopers to replace the 48th Regiment on the eastern sector; the latter became the reserve for the division.
On April 15, the NVA’s 341st Division launched multiple human-wave assaults on the 3rd Battalion, 52nd Regiment, which was securing the high ground in the western sector. Two companies of the 3/52 were overrun and the rest of the battalion had to withdraw. The attacking forces, reinforced with elements of the 6th Division, broke through the perimeter of defense of the 52nd Regiment the night of April 15. General Dao used his reserve to counterattack to stop the enemy’s advance toward Xuan Loc. Dao also requested permission to use the BLU-82B, also named “the Daisy Cutter,” on enemy attacking formations. The BLU-82 bomb, originally used to create an instant clearing in the jungle, had also been used as an anti-personnel weapon because of its large lethal radius (300–900 feet).
On April 16, the VNAF, assisted by technicians from DAO, dropped one BLU-82 bomb from a C-130 transport aircraft on an enemy concentration north of Xuan Loc. JGS’s intelligence report indicated that the bomb inflicted heavy casualties to the staff of NVA’s IV Corps and wiped out one regiment nearby.15For an instant, NVA, thinking that the U.S. had resumed B-52 strikes in support of ARVN, momentarily stopped the offensive to reassess the situation.
On the eastern sector, meanwhile, the 1st Airborne Brigade threw back the attacks of two regiments from the 7th NVA Division during the night of April 15. The enemy left many bodies in front of the paratroopers’ perimeter. On April 18, the 1st Airborne Brigade, reinforced with an M113 armored company, attacked enemy positions in the forested areas east and southeast of Xuan Loc. The enemy suffered about 200 KIA. Three paratroopers were killed, eighteen wounded, and one M113 APC was damaged.16
Xuan Loc, against heavy odds, stood its ground after twelve days of repeated assaults from vastly superior forces. By that time, the NVA leadership, stunned by the unexpectedly fierce defense of the garrison, concluded that it was futile—and too expensive—to try to take the city. They decided instead to bypass Xuan Loc and to launch a direct attack on Bien Hoa, the northern gate to the capital city of South Viet Nam.
To cope with the new development, on April 20 Lt. Gen. Nguyen Van Toan, the new III Corps commander, ordered the 18th Division to fall back to the new defense line: Trang Bom-Long Thanh. There, it continued to fight until Gen. Duong Van Minh, the new President of the Republic, ordered the surrender of all ARVN units.
According to the 18th Division’s after-action report, the respective losses in the battle of Xuan Loc were as follows:
Friendly: 30% for all participating units.
60% for Task Force 52.
Enemy: 5,000 to 6,000 casualties.
37 tanks and armored vehicles destroyed.
1 mounted anti-aircraft weapon captured.17
Undeniably, the public reputation of the South Vietnamese Army was, to a great extent, redeemed by the heroic stand of the 18th Division. “Despite the public image of corruption and incompetence,” wrote George J. Veith and Merle L. Pribbenow, “the ARVN, as shown in the battle of Xuan Loc, was not an army of bumblers and cowards as it is so often portrayed. It was an army that stood and fought with great courage not only on a few well-known occasions like the siege of An Loc, but also in hundreds of little battles whose names most Americans never knew.”18
One captured Communist document in the late 1960s boasted that “Saigon’s Infantry + American Firepower = National Liberation Army (NLA)” An Loc and ARVN’s successful defense of Kontum and recapture of Quang Tri in 1972 unequivocally demonstrated that, with American air support, the ARVN could defeat both VC and NVA forces in conventional warfare, or—to put it under a codified format that was often used in Communist propaganda literature—that “Saigon’s Infantry + American Firepower > NLA + NVA.”
And to this day, I am convinced that, had we continued to receive American fire support, we would have stopped and crushed the NVA offensive during the critical months of February, March, and April 1975. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case, and although we had won many battles in 1972, because one critical variable was missing in the above strategic equation, we inexorably ended up losing the war; and hundreds of thousands of ARVN officers and government officials of the former regime had to bear the brunt of the victors’ post-war politics of hatred and violence.
Losers are pirates
There is a Vietnamese saying: “Duoc lam vua, thua lam giac” (Winners are kings, losers are pirates.) The Communists had every intention of applying that law after their 1975 victory. A 2001 study by California’s Orange County Register, based on interviews of former inmates, both in t
he United States and Viet Nam, and hundreds of pages of documents, including testimony from more than 800 individuals sent to jails, found that:
—An estimated 1 million people were imprisoned without charges or trials.
—165,000 people died in the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam’s “re-education camps,” according to published academic studies in the United States and Europe.
—Thousands were abused or tortured: their hands and legs shackled in painful positions for months, their skin slashed by bamboo canes studded with thorns, their veins injected with poisonous chemicals, their spirits broken with stories about relatives being killed.
—Prisoners were incarcerated for as long as seventeen years, according to the U.S. State Department, with most terms ranging from three to ten years.
—At least 150 re-education prisons were built after Saigon fell twenty-six years ago.
—One in three South Vietnamese families had a relative in a re-education camp.19
Fortunately, after their release, ARVN officers who spent more than three years in these “re-education” camps were allowed to emigrate with their families to the United States under a U.S. Congress-approved humanitarian resettlement plan that benefited all Vietnamese who had sided with the United States during the Viet Nam War.
Maj. Gen. Le Minh Dao, former 18th Division commander, spent seventeen years in re-education camps. Dao was interned longer than most other generals probably because, as seen earlier, his division inflicted heavy casualties on the NVA’s IV Corps at Xuan Loc in April 1975, and temporarily thwarted their rush toward Saigon.
Brig. Gen. Mach Van Truong, former 8th Regiment commander in An Loc, also spent seventeen years in Communist concentration camps. Truong was elevated to brigadier general and commanded the 21st Division in the last few months of the Viet Nam War. After the siege of An Loc, a team of U.S. military doctors operated on his neck to remove the shrapnel that was lodged there since the second NVA attack on the city. By Truong’s account, the Communist prison officials told him they could spare his life but his “war crimes” could not go unpunished. In Truong’s case, the war crimes consisted of the timely reinforcement of the besieged garrison with his regiment and upsetting NVA’s attempt to take An Loc in order to establish the seat of the PRG in that city. Truong later confided that, had the U.S. doctors not removed the shrapnel in his neck, he would have likely died in the Communist concentration camps because the harsh manual labor in the camps would have caused the rupture of sensitive nerves in his neck by the unremoved shrapnel. General Truong now lives in Texas. He still complains about recurring headaches due to his old neck wound.
Hell in An Loc Page 26